An improved HS algorithms for the blocking flow shop scheduling problems

This paper presents an improved harmony search algorithms(IHS) based on genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the blocking flow shop scheduling problem. The largest position value (LPV) rule is used to convert continuous harmony vectors into job permutations and an efficient initialization scheme based on a variant of the NEH heuristic (NEH_PWT) is adopted to construct the initial harmony memory with certain quality and diversity. The computational result shows that the improved HS algorithm is not only better than HS algorithm, but also better than genetic algorithm and it is even better than the hybrid algorithms.